It’s hard for me to get excited about a world in which all of the people I know personally have barely-net-positive lives full of suffering and struggle, even if that world contains more people.
I’d imagine they must have lots of brilliant and amazing experiences to make up for the suffering, in order to leave them at a net-positive life.
Is this necessary? I feel like many people judge their lives as worth living even though their day-to-day experiences contain mostly pain. I wonder if we’re imagining different definitions for “barely-net-positive”. Maybe you mean “adding up the magnitude of moment-to-moment negative or positive qualia over someone’s entire life” (hedonistic utilitarianism) whereas I am usually imagining something more like “on reflection, the person judges their life as worth living” (kinda preference utilitarian).
My sense is that people choose to weather currently-net-negative lives for at least two reasons that they might endorse on reflection:
The negative parts of their life may be solvable, such that the EV of their future is plausibly positive
Ending their life has a few terrible externalities, e.g. the impact it would have on their close loved ones
Eliminating those considerations, I would expect the bar for World Z to be much better than the worst lives people reflectively consider worth living today.
I’d imagine they must have lots of brilliant and amazing experiences to make up for the suffering, in order to leave them at a net-positive life.
Is this necessary? I feel like many people judge their lives as worth living even though their day-to-day experiences contain mostly pain. I wonder if we’re imagining different definitions for “barely-net-positive”. Maybe you mean “adding up the magnitude of moment-to-moment negative or positive qualia over someone’s entire life” (hedonistic utilitarianism) whereas I am usually imagining something more like “on reflection, the person judges their life as worth living” (kinda preference utilitarian).
My sense is that people choose to weather currently-net-negative lives for at least two reasons that they might endorse on reflection:
The negative parts of their life may be solvable, such that the EV of their future is plausibly positive
Ending their life has a few terrible externalities, e.g. the impact it would have on their close loved ones
Eliminating those considerations, I would expect the bar for World Z to be much better than the worst lives people reflectively consider worth living today.